#218 – An Interview with Eric VanWyk - Meiotic Mountenance Mooshimeter

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Recorded September 29th, 2014. Episode 218 with guest Eric Van Wyk. Meiotic, Mountainance, Bushi Meter.

Dave Jones: Welcome to The Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV Blog.

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Eric Van Wyk: And I'm Eric Van Wyk of Moushim Engineering. Who nailed the intro.

Dave Jones: Excellent work, Eric. Thank you for joining our humble show. Oh, thank you so much for having me. And if people are wondering what my voice is, yes, I've got something. So I'm going to sound worse than I ordinarily do. But Eric sounds wonderful. They're from, where are you hailing from?

Eric Van Wyk: I'm just outside of Boston right now in Needham, Massachusetts at the Olin College of Engineering.

Dave Jones: How big is the Olin College of Engineering? I've never heard of it.

Eric Van Wyk: I think we're just north of 300 students now, all told.

Chris Gammell: Okay. And listeners may remember two guests in the past have been from Olin.

Dave Jones: I don't remember details like that.

Chris Gammell: It's okay. It's okay. But yeah, Kent Lundberg was a professor there. And Ian Danaher was a student there. And I couldn't remember if anyone else was there. There you go.

Eric Van Wyk: Ian was a student in my class.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So Eric is both, actually. That's pretty crazy. So they asked you back, right? This is like a student becomes the master kind of thing, huh?

Eric Van Wyk: I think they were trying to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. But it's good to be back.

Dave Jones: Well, is it just an engineering school?

Eric Van Wyk: Or is it a... Yeah. Olin offers three degree programs. Electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and engineering. And the third one's kind of a choose your own adventure, as long as your adventure is in engineering.

Dave Jones: See, that's fascinating. We don't have an engineering-only school here in this country. Yeah. That's just foreign to me.

Chris Gammell: Well, like engineering's always something else? Basically, it's always part of a...

Chris Gammell: It's my program?

Dave Jones: You know, it's always part of a uni. It's always part of a big university who does 10 million other things, you know? Yeah. Right, right. Gotcha. Right. But this is just set up as an engineering college.

Eric Van Wyk: I like to view it as the students at Olin are professional guinea pigs for engineering education. And so, the main research output of the university is attempts at figuring out new ways to educate engineers.

Chris Gammell: Interesting. Does it work?

Eric Van Wyk: We'll see. I had a lot of fun, but no, I think it's working. I hope it's working.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I wonder about that, too, like how it changes dynamics of, you know, like class sizes and stuff like that. And, you know, there's positive and negatives about that, you know, having smaller classes. And being, you know, tighter knit. Like, I hardly knew anyone in my engineering classes even, even after four years. Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally. Seems like when you only got 300 at the whole school, it's kind of a little more. Yeah, it's much.

Eric Van Wyk: And I was part of the second class admitted. So, that meant that when I showed up as a freshman, there were no juniors or seniors. It was 150 total. Right.

Chris Gammell: 100% fewer wedgies. Yes.

Dave Jones: I just like, it's like a chicken and egg thing. I mean, how do you start an engineering school and then get students to agree to come to it when it has no reputation at all? How does that, how do you make a choice? Oh, I'm going to go there instead of a real college, you know, in quote marks. Right. One that's, you know, got, you know, a real ivory tower. Right.

Eric Van Wyk: I think you just have to drink the Kool-Aid. When I made the decision, it was after I met the faculty and they were very clearly passionate about what they were doing. And I remember the moment of thinking, well, this will be an interesting adventure and let's see what happens. And I'm glad I did.

Dave Jones: So who founded this? Where did the faculty come from? Do they just magically appear? This faculty or, you know?

Eric Van Wyk: A good portion of them were pulled from the local engineering colleges. So we got a few from MIT and then just like-minded people that were interested in researching how other people learn.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Right. So it was actually set up, like you weren't joking, it is set up as a school that learns how to learn.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Messes with its students is the answer.

Dave Jones: It sounds very war games to me. The machine actually learns how to learn. Wopper. Sorry, that just popped into my head.

Chris Gammell: So Eric, and you teach a- So we've talked about this a little bit offline before, but like you teach a non-standard- Well, what's the class now called?

Eric Van Wyk: Sure. I think you're referring to the seminar that I'm teaching, which is affectionately referred to as danger, high voltage.

Chris Gammell: Yes, that's the one. And what is that?

Eric Van Wyk: It's a one-credit seminar. So I have about an hour of their time a week worth of lecture and two hours outside of class. And what we're trying to do is work through how you make a product that is safe in the hands of consumers or in the hands of patients. How you go through the regulatory process. What it means to do a high pot test versus a ESD test. Why you would want to ground. All of the stuff necessary to make sure that your device is safe. Wow. Which is awesome because- We never had anything like that.

Dave Jones: Those classes just didn't exist. Yeah, not even close.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. One of the experiments they're running right now is alumni are allowed to come in and teach these one-credit seminars on basically whatever they think might be interesting to the students. Wow. Since my background immediately after graduation was in medical device development, and now I've been working on this Mushy Meter, I've been doing a lot of regulatory compliance and thought they might be interested in it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and what was the one- you had a seminar before this one too. That's the one actually I was thinking of.

Eric Van Wyk: Oh, the power supplies.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right, right. So what was that one?

Eric Van Wyk: Well, every circuit board that you make has a couple power supplies on it, just about. And I knew nothing about it, about designing those coming out of college. So I figured it would just go through what's a linear regulator, what's a voltage reference, what's a buck regulator, how do you spec that, how do you talk to a vendor, how do you figure out your supply chain for those types of decisions?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's awesome. That's, you know, I've only ever heard, there's, I mean, I'm sure there's other classes like this, but I have limited. But I know, so Larry Sears, former guest of the show as well, he does a class of case here in Cleveland, which is like, really hands-on, really, you know, covers a lot of that other stuff as well. And then, and then Kent, also, Olin professor at one point, he did stuff with like the, what was it, like reverse engineering stomp boxes or something like that?

Eric Van Wyk: Oh, yeah, he did some great stuff. And I think it's electrical engineering prototyping was, I think that was the title of his class.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: See, I find that fascinating because you've done, right, you did your degree and you just said, yeah, I came out not knowing how to, you know, build a, you know, a simple power supply into an actual product, like a little DC to DC converter or a linear regulator or whatever. And that's, you know, that goes to show what we've been talking about for years, that, yeah, engineering is so broad and you have to learn so much that you just, you know, you don't end up learning all of the basic things you think you should or that are needed. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, and they can go deep too. I mean, like you can go, you can go as deep as you want on power supply stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah, totally. DC converters. Yeah, yeah. But, but yeah, sometimes you don't even touch that stuff until, until you need to. So that's, that's great. You're, that's great. You expose the students to that. That's really cool. And I remember too, you said something about when, when you were designing that curriculum, you, something with like, it was something like a simple like LM317, but they had to design it themselves, like a, just a simple voltage regulator or something like that.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. One of my favorite things to do for that class was to describe a problem and then only allow them to use chips they could find in the stock room. Ah, nice. And so I remember one of them was to make linear regulators out of whatever was on hand. And some of the students used a Zener diode as their voltage reference, which is fine for that type of task. And some of them just stacked up normal diodes. Um, and then we measured the performance of these, uh, cheapo crappy linear regulators that they made on breadboards. And, um, so I brought in a, a hot air gun and would just blast air at their device and say, okay, what is your temperature coefficient? Um, and it was, it was really fun to see that the, the Zener diodes and the, the regular diodes would have, uh, opposite signs in their coefficients. And, and that blew their minds.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Um, that's great. I mean, that's great hands-on stuff. I like that a lot. So you mentioned the, uh, the medical stuff as well. Why don't you tell us, why don't you kind of work us backwards then or go from your graduation forwards, I guess.

Eric Van Wyk: After graduation, I joined, uh, DECA research and development, which is in, uh, Manchester, New Hampshire. And, uh, most of what I did there was, uh, medical device development. Um,

Chris Gammell: People might know that from Dean, that's Dean Kamen's company. Yes, that's Dean Kamen. Segway and yada, yada, yada, the Luke and stuff like that.

Eric Van Wyk: So I, I had become involved in that because I was very much into first robotics, which is the high school, uh, robotics competition. Um, my senior thesis project was to re-architect the control system for that, uh, for that competition. And then, uh, when that proposal was accepted with huge, heavy, heavy, heavy modifications, uh, I joined DECA so that I could continue working on it. But my day job was to design medical devices.

Dave Jones: Right. And how much of your day was spent regulatory and paperwork and other stuff and how much was actually spent designing?

Eric Van Wyk: Uh, so my particular role was more, so I, I started out in, in more design. Um, but it was, a lot of it is designed for regulatory. So not, not the testing process, but the figuring out how you can design something to eventually pass it. Um, which really appealed to the OCD in, in, in, in me, um, and making spreadsheets that would, uh, indicate how many patient errors would occur given these parameters and always striving to make that as close to zero as possible. Spreadsheets.

Chris Gammell: Pivot tables. Vlookups. Yay. Yay. It is a sickness.

Eric Van Wyk: I have a feeling I'm not the, the coolest guest you've had before. It's really satisfying. It's good.

Dave Jones: It's good. Dada's fab. Nice love.

Chris Gammell: It's nice that you change like one cell and like the whole thing just goes zoop and just the whole thing updates. That's great. I love that kind of stuff.

Dave Jones: Oh, goodness.

Chris Gammell: So, so when you say designed for regulatory though, so like what, is this mostly like, uh, FDA? I, I, I don't know much. Actually, uh, Alicia and Chris on, on the embedded podcast, they went over a bunch of the embedded, the, the, a bunch of the regulatory stuff in a episode, a couple episodes ago. And I really didn't know much about the, the ones that are out there, uh, which is this just like generic FDA type approval stuff?

Eric Van Wyk: So the FDA is what took more time out of my schedule. Um, we were working primarily with class two medical devices, which are fail safe devices. Um, which means that any one component in your circuit can be faulted in, in whatever way. And you need to continue to, you don't have to continue delivering care to the patient, but you need to make sure that you stop delivering care in a safe manner.

Dave Jones: Well, I thought every medical device would be at least that class. Sure.

Eric Van Wyk: So class one would be like a bandaid. And if the bandaid falls off, that's fine.

Speaker ?: Right.

Eric Van Wyk: Um, class two is that it needs to fail in a safe manner. And class three means that it needs to operate through a failure mode. Got it.

Dave Jones: Right.

Eric Van Wyk: Um, and several of the products that the company was working on were class three, uh, but I was not specifically working on those.

Dave Jones: Class three, I can imagine would be extremely difficult.

Eric Van Wyk: Yes.

Dave Jones: Um, because how many failure modes can you think of and cater for? I mean, it, they're, you know, it can't be an infinite number.

Eric Van Wyk: Right. And it's, it's interesting to go through your design and, and find orthogonalities in it and start to reduce it so that you can begin to approach it because an exhaustive approach will just take infinite time. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: Goodness. It's also fun because it means that for just about everything you do, you have to come up with two separate ways to do it. So if you have an argument with another engineer, you can say, okay, you can be primary and I'll be backup.

Chris Gammell: What does that mean?

Eric Van Wyk: So if you have something in the circuit that performs a function, it needs to have a backup for that and they need to be different from each other, which means that if, if you design it one way and I design it another, maybe both of our designs can get into the final product.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's kind of fun. Sharing means caring. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But then you've got to have a mechanism in place to switch over from one to the other. Yeah. I mean, that, that alone requires a separate designer just to handle that aspect. Right.

Speaker ?: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Fail over all that crap. We had an industrial in a couple of places, but it was always more expensive.

Eric Van Wyk: Which I'm sure this stuff was. One of the common ways to do that is to have both halves always delivering care. Oh, okay. So that if one fails, the other can continue. With half care. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But sub care. Yeah. You are now half this healthy. Hey, would you be able to give an example? If that is like something that drives a pump, would you have two separate pumps with two separate pipes and then you'd get at least half the fluid going through or something?

Eric Van Wyk: How would... So maybe you have a motor that's a bifiler wound or you have two motors that are driving the same shaft and then everything that powers that motor would be an independent circuit.

Dave Jones: Right. And then the motor, if it failed, if one motor failed, then that would be like a slip thing and the other motor could stir it so it wouldn't lock up the shaft. Exactly. Yeah. And then the other one would got it. Okay. Interesting.

Chris Gammell: It's like your mom's cruise ship, Dave. How it was going with one motor for a while and then it just stopped.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Then it just died. Oh, goodness.

Chris Gammell: So you said you couldn't talk about all the products you worked on there, Eric, but what were... Are you going to talk about any of the products that you were there, like the first stuff or... Sure.

Eric Van Wyk: So I was very fortunate to be able to work with the team that was developing the new FIRST Robotics Control System when it switched over to the Compact Rio. So the team was people at DECA, people at WPI, BAE, Texas Instruments, or at that point Luminary Micro, and National Instruments. And, of course, people at FIRST itself.

Chris Gammell: And Compact Rio is an NI standard, right? Or is it broader?

Eric Van Wyk: Yes. It's an NI standard.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Yeah. I think I've seen that before. It's kind of industrial, control-y, kind of, and then they have the GUI, like the LabVIEW type GUI, right?

Eric Van Wyk: Exactly.

Dave Jones: That's rather clever. How to sell more product. Get it specified as the standard platform in FIRST Robotics. That's right. Get them young.

Eric Van Wyk: All of those Compact Rios were given away for free, so it wasn't a very profitable move.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. No, no, no. You want to bet? It's back-loaded, Eric. You want to bet? It's back-loaded. Every kid who goes to Olin, and then they go to, you know, whatever company, and they're, oh, yeah, I'm used to using Rio. Yes, this is good. It's very smart. I mean, there's nothing against it. No, no, no. It's just, yep.

Dave Jones: Very clever.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, that's cool. So, like, the controls, so, like, the, so, is there, like, a standard compute module that they give every team? Is that the idea?

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. So, the Compact Rio runs all the user code in one processor, and then there's an FPGA in the backplane that handles safety stuff and everything that the students don't need to be wondering about, worrying about. And then that plugs into a set of hardware. My task was to design the non-COTS hardware to provide an easier interface for the students, so power distribution or digital breakout, things like that. So, they all get a standard electronics kit and then a couple of standard mechanical components, and they can go from there.

Dave Jones: That's pretty cool. But does that take all the differences out of the robots? Or does, you know, or does it, or is it important to have a sort of a fixed playing field at the embedded processing level?

Eric Van Wyk: So, is your question electrical or mechanical in nature?

Dave Jones: I guess it's both. Because I thought, like, it was like a free-for-all. Like, you had, oh, you know, your specs had to be, okay, your robot has to fit with inside a cube, or it has to be X dimensions, and that was it. And the rest was left up to you of how you actually did it.

Eric Van Wyk: Sure. So, I have two different answers for the two different fields. And for electrical, it does level the playing field in a large manner, but I don't see that as a bad thing. Right. Okay. Because I don't believe that it levels it down. I believe that it levels it up. And there is always the ability for teams to add their own electronics. Got it. And in the rules, there are specifications to say, basically, you can't put your electronics in the path of the safety control system. That's good. But if you want to put a camera on there and strap your own processing board on there, and then send the information through the safety system, then you can do that.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's pretty cool.

Eric Van Wyk: Right. Teams will make boards that pick up sensors, and that's always fun to watch. In the mechanical realm of that, there's much less of a level playing field. There is a kit bot chassis that you can use, and not very many teams do. So, you see an extremely wide range of designs. And my favorite thing to do is wander around and look at all the different ways that they make their robots move. Four wheels, six wheels, drops. Do they have omni wheels? Are they using Mecanum? Are they using Crab, Twitch, Octanum? Like, it's really neat to see all these different things these people have come up with.

Chris Gammell: Dave, do you know what he's talking about, right? I think I passed six wheels. I was like, okay, yeah, sure. I think I was lost at Crab or something. I don't know.

Eric Van Wyk: Sure, but they've designed drive systems that can drive sideways. Right, yeah.

Dave Jones: Wow.

Eric Van Wyk: And then there's probably six or seven different ways that they can do that. And each year, a team or two will come up with a new way that might not become canon.

Chris Gammell: Got it. So, you go to the competitions every year still and everything?

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah, I was a robot inspector for a couple of years. Robot inspector on the business card.

Dave Jones: Robot inspector. That's great.

Eric Van Wyk: That's a real blast.

Dave Jones: So, your medical background seeded you with the anal-ness. Is that a word?

Chris Gammell: I think it's usually referred to as anal retentiveness. But, yes, anal-ness. Anal-ness. Let's run with anal-ness. Yes, yes.

Dave Jones: The anal-ness to carry over into your other designs. And is that a good or a bad thing?

Eric Van Wyk: I think you need people like me. And I think you also need people that are much less restrained working together.

Dave Jones: I.e. more productive, perhaps.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah, exactly. Right. I had an intern whose nickname was Hurricane because he was the fastest person I've ever met to get the first 80% of a project done. Yeah. And destroy the lab in the process. And there was no way for him to go from 80% to 100%. But in the time that I did 1, 0 to 80%, he would do 40%. Wow. Yep.

Chris Gammell: That's iteration, folks.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No. Yeah. So, you've got to have people like that. You know, you've got to have a whole cross team of people like that to really get a good product to market. It's very rare that one person is very good at the whole lot, you know. Yep. So, not necessarily very good, but, you know, because you can be very good at all the parts. Yeah. But not necessarily have the... And speedy and quality. Yeah. Yeah. But not necessarily have the motivation and the, you know, that sort of thing to do them all, so to speak. So, hmm. Because some people get satisfaction just from doing that hurricane, you know, that 0 to 80%, as fast as possible. And guys like you might get satisfaction from doing, you know, the final 10% really, really well, you know.

Eric Van Wyk: And I'm rather proud that everything I've worked on since graduation has made it to market or through regulatory.

Dave Jones: That's... Nice. ...totally the opposite to my career. Yep. Everything got shit canned. Yes. So, not through my fault, you know, that's just the way it, you know. Yeah. It worked out.

Chris Gammell: So, where else after that? So, you... Sure. So, after DECA, you were at some other places?

Eric Van Wyk: Internal to DECA, I transitioned to the two-man RF team and spent a year learning about radios, which was a blast. I transitioned from there to Luminary Micro, which actually halfway through my interview process was bought by Texas Instruments. So, I got to work with the Stellaris line. And that was a lot of fun. Doing what? A little N3 Cortexes. Doing what? So, I was on the engineering marketing team, which means that I developed things like evaluation or demo kits. Specifically, I did an FPGA eval kit. So, the Stellaris line has a nice memory port that can hook into other machine interfaces. That's pretty cool.

Dave Jones: Been there, done that.

Eric Van Wyk: Yep.

Dave Jones: The world's most expensive demo board. The nano board. The Altium nano board. Goodness. Only $4,000.

Eric Van Wyk: Oh, my goodness.

Dave Jones: That's what we said. And then the people on the team said, yeah, except not in such nicer language. But marketing said, oh, yeah, we'll sell a million of these. Yeah, okay.

Eric Van Wyk: I'll buy 40 bucks worth of one. Yeah, exactly. You get a footstand. I also did the math library for the Cortex, a fixed point motor control. So, how you do fixed point math in that processor. Which is way too much assembly code.

Dave Jones: Because it needed to be optimized, obviously.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. It was meant for embedded motor controls or other control loops. The M3 Cortex has a really beautiful multiply unit. And it also has a really beautiful shifter. But it doesn't have any support for... Shifters, multipliers.

Dave Jones: Sorry, we're not making fun of you. We're just nerding out over.

Eric Van Wyk: But it doesn't have any floating point support. So, yeah, to hit those timings.

Dave Jones: You have to code it all in assembly.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. We tried to do it in C. But unfortunately, we needed to support seven different compilers. And convincing those different compilers to all emit the same ops was not feasible at the time.

Chris Gammell: You got to the screw-it-I'll-do-it-myself point, huh? Yep.

Dave Jones: Is that seven different vendor compilers all offering different compilers for your chips? Exactly.

Eric Van Wyk: Because it was an ARM M3 Cortex. So, the ecosystem was very well developed.

Dave Jones: And there's plenty of... I was going to say sevens a lot, you know, for something like the... Sorry, Texas Instruments, Tidal Aris ones. But yeah, they're an ARM platform. Yep. That's tough. And what sort of speed difference did you ultimately see by moving to Assembler from C?

Eric Van Wyk: It's hard to nail that down in specific ways. We were able to get most of our advanced functions under 100 clock cycles. Yep. And if you're going from floating point, then it's up in the multiple thousands. Right. Oh, yeah. Of course. And my favorite was that we were able to, on average, beat the C2000 DSP, even though that processor is nominally designed for these algorithms. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's interesting. Okay. You hear that, Trey? You hear that, Trey? Trey, so you've just wiped out the entire Texas Instruments DSP market because you can do it faster in ARM and assembly.

Speaker ?: Oops.

Dave Jones: Oops. There goes their entire division collapse. Sell your TI shares now.

Chris Gammell: We'll have Trey and Eric back on at some point. They could duke it out. Right. Instruction by instruction. I'm ready for it.

Dave Jones: Battle of the opcodes.

Chris Gammell: That's right.

Eric Van Wyk: Oh, goodness. So, what was next? So, I got a little bit bored of the assembly code. Had a blast with the team, but I then moved on to National Instruments where I worked in their educational division. So, essentially, I played with Lego robots for three years.

Chris Gammell: Sweet. That must have been really tough on you, man. Yeah. It's got to be.

Eric Van Wyk: You get those calluses.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. The little bump-sized calluses from the Lego bricks. Yep. Is that the one that the first uses as well? Like the first Robot League or the Lego League, rather?

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah, exactly. I worked on two of the versions of it. The NXT is the one that's been used in first Lego League for the past several years. And then the new one that just came out is the EV3, which is currently in transition in FLL. So, I believe this past year you could use either of them.

Chris Gammell: And the EV3 is the one that... I remember hearing about that. That's the Linux-based one or whatever that has Linux on board?

Eric Van Wyk: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's pretty cool. So, you were there when they started doing that kind of stuff?

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. I did the communication for that device.

Chris Gammell: Oh. Is there like a proprietary bus or what is it? I don't... I've never used it.

Eric Van Wyk: Oh, just doing the driver support for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and USB.

Chris Gammell: Oh, cool. Okay. That's great. So, you had to like port Linux and then rewrite drivers and stuff like that? Sure.

Eric Van Wyk: I was on the host side, but my counterpart in Denmark did what you were just talking about.

Chris Gammell: Did you ever get to go over to the factory? It was a blast. Oh, you lucky bastard.

Eric Van Wyk: It's a scene from The Sorcerer's Apprentice, but you get to touch things. It's fully automated. There's no manual labor in the... No repetitive manual labor in the factory. They have these six modules off of the main corridor. Each one has, I think, 100 to 150 injection molding machines just doing their thing.

Chris Gammell: Oh, man.

Eric Van Wyk: That's awesome.

Dave Jones: Tomping them out. Right. Yeah. Wow. Printing gold.

Eric Van Wyk: One of the really surprising parts for me was that these parts coming out have such a high static electricity charge that when they fall into the bucket, they're repelled back up. So, they fall in, bounce off the electric field, slam into the side, discharge, and then they can fall in.

Dave Jones: Wow. Whoa. That's interesting. I've never seen... And how do they get that charge? Is it from the injection molding process? How does that...

Eric Van Wyk: I believe so, but my mechanical engineering is pretty weak.

Chris Gammell: That's crazy. I just thought of an idea for a new weapon. Right. Hold still.

Eric Van Wyk: I'm going to injection mold a thousand Legos near you. That's right. Projectile Legos. That's one. Kerchunk. That's two.

Dave Jones: So, is it just the one... There's only one place in the world that they actually make these? There's only the one actual factory or...?

Eric Van Wyk: I'm not clear on that one. Right. Yeah, I can't answer that question. Got it.

Dave Jones: And are these just the standard bricks, or are these all the little men and all the little characters and all the...

Eric Van Wyk: Everything.

Dave Jones: Everything they have these days.

Eric Van Wyk: Oh, I'm going to get the brand name wrong, but they're Polly Pocket clone. I was going to hate you for saying that. They inject all the little accessories in one shot and then put it in a bag, and there's a robot that's doing all that and just spitting out these accessory bags. They're also the world's largest tire manufacturer. Wow.

Chris Gammell: Oh, right. Because there are many tires, right? Because there are many tires, right? Because there are many tires, right? I think I've heard that statistic before. That doesn't count. Yeah, exactly.

Eric Van Wyk: I would pay money just to watch that machine go all day, because after its injection, there's five or six post-processing steps.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah, it's insane.

Dave Jones: I would assume, because it's just the sheer number of variations, they must have their own in-house mold-making things, right? Yeah, they wouldn't subcontract that. They'd just do that, and they'd have a whole department just making molds. They'd have a thousand Oompa Loompas there, just spitting out these titanium molds. Solidworks Oompa Loompas.

Eric Van Wyk: I think that's actually their primary job there. So the humans will make the molds, clean the molds, and set up and tear down, but then the machines will run for weeks without intervention.

Dave Jones: Make the bricks. That's awesome. Because you've got experience with this, with your product, which we'll get into in injection molding side of things.

Eric Van Wyk: Yep.

Dave Jones: So what sort of mold material do you have to make to churn out a million Lego bricks without the mold failing?

Eric Van Wyk: I can't remember if it's an ABS or an ABS polycarb blend, but it's somewhere in there.

Chris Gammell: Really? I always remember people telling me about ABS. It's an ABS mold. I thought it was like a... Oh, no, no, no.

Dave Jones: Oh, the mold. No, that's hardened steel. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I'm talking about. Yes, the mold itself.

Chris Gammell: So you're saying like a million-shot mold, though, Dave? Yeah, yeah. Like, that's what you're saying? Well, they probably just turn over molds more often than... I mean, you can do million-shot molds, can't you, Eric? I mean, like, that is a possibility.

Eric Van Wyk: You're past my depth of knowledge. But, yeah, I did take a DFM course, a design for manufacture course. And the part on injection molding, they would have stats. So, like, if you're running really cheap molds, you can have this draft angle and a bunch of guidelines. If you're expensive, you can do this. And then the last category was if you're Lego, then you can do these things that are impossible for anyone else.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, Apple was the other one I always heard for, like, the super finish and stuff like that. You got it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no ejector pin marks. Because it's all about the smoothness of finish and the wear angles and how sharp the angles can get and all that sort of stuff, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I mean, those Lego pieces aren't going to stab themselves into people's feet. They have to make them sharp for when they're sitting on the floor.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah, well, they do have the post-processing step where there's the angle grinder to make sure that they have that nice get-into-your-foot edge on them.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: The Yelp angle. And are these, like, visually inspected or does someone just do a once-in-a-million-brick batch inspection or how does it – have you got any clue?

Eric Van Wyk: I didn't see any human inspection. Right. So I'm not sure if they're doing an automated optical or if they're doing – what their quality control process is there. Okay. Interesting.

Chris Gammell: Remember, he didn't work for Lego, Dave. No, I know. But he's visited the factory. But he's been there. I know.

Dave Jones: He's the only one we know who's been to the factory. We have to extract all the information from him. That's right. That's right.

Chris Gammell: He's seen the magic happen.

Eric Van Wyk: Oh, goodness.

Chris Gammell: We need you to work for them again, Eric. We need you to get back in there. You have to go back.

Eric Van Wyk: You're going to have to play with toys again?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Sorry. I'm on it. Okay. So why did you leave your job making toys?

Eric Van Wyk: So the story is that my undergrad advisor sent an email to a mailing list that I was on and I replied with a sarcastic response and accidentally hit reply all. And as a result of that, I got a job as an adjunct here at Olin. Oops.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And they say snarkiness doesn't pay.

Eric Van Wyk: It paid off in spades. I'm really loving it here. And I realize that teaching is what I want to do.

Chris Gammell: Nice.

Dave Jones: Excellent. Someone has to do it. So thank you very much on behalf of us all. Someone has to do it. That's right, Dave. I almost became a teacher once.

Chris Gammell: You are a teacher, though. You're just a teacher in a different medium.

Dave Jones: Kind of, yeah. But, you know, not with the direct feedback of people in the class. You know, it's totally different. I put my material out there and that's it. Right? Take it all. People, ew. You know, yeah, I've got to deal with humans, you know. And I don't like, like, I love it when people are as enthusiastic as I am. But I know that, you know, from my experience being a student, that most people aren't as enthusiastic as I am. And I can't stand that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, Eric, how many, I mean, so you're, I mean, you're not, you're not 10 plus years out of school or anything. So what is the, what is your reaction to that kind of stuff? Do you see people that are, you know, kind of ho-hum about the field? Or is it pretty decently because, you know, they're self-selecting going to Olin?

Eric Van Wyk: So it depends on what you're teaching. So core classes, you'll have a mixture of students that are super excited about it. And some students just need to get that particular requirement out of the way. The seminars, they're all psyched about it because they, they don't have to be there. They're just there because they think it's interesting. Yep. Um, I teach a lot of computer architecture, uh, and, and that one's a blast because, uh, even if you don't want to be a computer architect, there's, there's enough to learn in that field that is confusing and interesting that I can, I can usually keep their attention. Yeah. But, uh, there's always a couple of playing cookie, you know, cookie clicker or, or whatever the latest flash game of the month is. Angry birds and all that stuff. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Ah. Yeah. I always wonder about that. Like I didn't have, I was just before the laptop time, like some people had laptops, but I would never have survived if, if I would have a laptop, you know, like even if, even if I was supposed to be doing spice simulations or something fun in class, you know, like that, I don't know.

Dave Jones: Well, back in back when I was a boy, we, we did have laptops. Um, but like there was no internet, right? The, the internet didn't exist. Right. So it was, there goes that huge distraction right there. So it was, the laptop was just a tool to, you know, write and actually design stuff on. That's it. Which.

Chris Gammell: Plus you probably threw out your back trying to get it into the classroom.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. Yeah. It was a, you know, I took my old IBM L40 SX 386 SX notebook, you know, and, uh, yep.

Eric Van Wyk: That was the one that you had to, you could only go through double doors. Yeah. Right. Right.

Dave Jones: Ah, I'll, I'll pay that. All right.

Chris Gammell: Oh goodness. So is this like, uh, so the other thing I wonder about with like the teaching side of things, and then we can get into the moosh, uh, is, is this kind of like, because it's a newer school as well, you're kind of designing even, even the core curriculum stuff from, from scratch. I mean, do you have a lot of license on that stuff or how does that go?

Eric Van Wyk: So with the seminars, I just have carte blanche and, uh, that's, that's exciting and terrifying at the same time.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. Um, with, uh, with the more core classes, uh, it's not necessarily just do whatever you feel like at the time. Um, but, uh, I can rewrite my lectures on a moment's notice. And, uh, especially the first year that I was teaching, uh, a student would ask a question and I'd say, well, dang it, now I have to go and rewrite the next two weeks lectures because that was a really cool question.

Dave Jones: That was a brilliant question. Yeah. You bastard. Thanks. No, but that, that's how it gets refined, you know? And yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, and I think, I think my, my gripe was always, uh, with professors that were like, you know, 10, 10 year, 30 year kind of stuff. And they're just reading their slides. They did from 30 years ago. Yeah. So, yep. As long as you're not doing that, usually I think you're winning, you know, if you're engaged.

Dave Jones: Heck I, I, I had, you know, I'd point out something and they'd actually tell you to shut up, you know? Like, yeah, that's how bad, don't question, shut up, you know? And yeah. So you're flipping the bird. I'm sure that went over well with Dave. I'm sure that's, yeah, that went down really well. You know? I'm sorry, but you're wrong. You've drawn that wrong, you know? Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: Anyway, let's not go.

Chris Gammell: Boy. So, uh, yeah, let's get into it. Uh, so the Mushimeter, uh, first off, I kept repeating at the beginning of the episode, does it mean, is, does it derive from Mushimushi or Moshi Moshi?

Eric Van Wyk: Uh, no, so, uh, Moshi Moshi. I don't even know what that is. It's a Japanese greeting. Um, and, uh. Yeah, a telephone. So if you pick up the phone, Moshi Moshi. Um, no, um, it's, it's actually from, uh, Zen Buddhism. This will sound a little weird, but, uh, the phrase Moshin no Shin is, uh, uh, direct translation heartless or, or director translation heart without heart. Uh, and the cultural.

Dave Jones: I'm going to call my company, my product heartless.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. The cultural translation is to, uh, to do what you need to do without overthinking it. Um. Like picking a name? Ouch. Ouch.

Chris Gammell: I think I made that joke when you, when we, you and I were having beers last time. So I think it's fair to say it online. Come on, man. Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: I think you owe me another beer then.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think I probably do. Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: Uh, but yeah, it's, it's the, don't get too wrapped up in, in, in the biases and the, the things that get in the way. Yeah. And it was, it was funny at the time and I enjoyed it. So.

Dave Jones: Which is ironic because you come from the anal retentive medical background and you're fussing over all the super duper fine details of this thing.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Uh, I think also, uh, I grew up in Tokyo. So the, the concept is closer in my head and my partner is a half Korean. So maybe to our, our, our ears, it has a different ring than to a more Western ear.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Well, doesn't it mean something bad in German too? Oh. I think I saw that on. Yeah. EV blog forum. Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: Maybe that's not a fit for air, but yes, it is a, something that you would more likely read on the stall of a bathroom in Germany than you would know.

Chris Gammell: Right. We'll let, we'll, we'll let listeners go look that one up on their own. Yeah. That is an unfortunate happenstance. Oops.

Eric Van Wyk: Oh, good. Yeah. These things happen. I mean, it's not quite the Nova that doesn't go, but it's close. Oh yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Nova.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Or the Prada, which is wanker in Spanish or something. Oh, really? I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Like, I wonder about that. Like, you know, especially like 30, 40 years ago. I mean, there was a lot less like, like world, not worldliness, but just internationalism, right? You didn't have to worry about that stuff. And these days it's like, yeah.

Dave Jones: We can look that up on Google. Yeah. We can, we'll whack it into Google Translate. Oh, it means wanker. Great. Hey, I'm going to make fun of you. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, like, but maybe, I mean, like, I don't, I don't think I would have thought of that to look that up and especially across languages because you're not going to get results in a, in a different. Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: And the German word is not spelled the same way. So it didn't pop. Oh, okay. Just sounds like it's just not going to work.

Dave Jones: So tell us how the mushy meter and your mushy company came about. Sorry.

Eric Van Wyk: Sure. So both James and I have experience with mobile robots. So mine is from the, the educational space with FRC. Uh, and I spent a lot of time chasing robots or, or, or writing them and trying to take these measurements because as soon as you take a mobile robot up off the carpet and put it on blocks, it's, it's a totally different beast. Um, and James had been working at, uh, Boston Dynamics on, uh, Petman and, and all those really super high end, um, mobile robots. Like those evil looking ones.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That now owned by Google. Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: They're beautiful and terrifying all at the same time. Right. And we, we came to the conclusion that you can't take a measurement on a bench and get the same information that you would if you could measure it in situ. Um, and the biggest barrier to that was the human. So what we wanted to do is put a little bit of a, of an air gap between you and the measurement you're taking.

Dave Jones: Uh-huh.

Eric Van Wyk: Um, we had been working on some other Bluetooth energy devices and it seemed to be a natural fit.

Dave Jones: So did you originally start out by going, we'll make a product out of this or did you just go, Oh, we just hack something together to, for our own use?

Eric Van Wyk: Uh, it was, it was the second we, we hacked it together and then realized that it would be very useful.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. As most good designs come out. Because if you go into it thinking, Oh, I'm going to, yeah, this is a product idea because, you know, I don't care about that. This is what I'm going to do, you know? And then usually, yeah, the engineering tends to fail.

Eric Van Wyk: Well, you heard it here first. Dave thinks it's a good idea.

Chris Gammell: That's right. And it's a headless unit.

Dave Jones: No, I've, I've never said it's not a good idea. I've said that they're not a replacement. Wireless, these phone connected multimeters are not a replacement for a regular multimeter. As a lot of people think they are. And he agrees. There you go, folks. Thank you.

Eric Van Wyk: Right. But, uh, may I interest you in my, my brand new hammer? It has a rotating head so that when you hammer in screws, it's even more effective. No, it's yet another tool in your toolbox. And as engineers, we need to select the right tool for the right job. Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, totally. Yeah. If, if you would need to measure something in situ and you can't have wires go into it, it's, it's the tool to use. You know, you can sort of put your multimeter on there in data logging mode and then set it and go. And then it sort of, you know, logs the data and then you can take it off later. But, you know, it's not quite as versatile as a, as a phone connected one. Totally. I got nothing against these at all. I think they're great.

Chris Gammell: Well, we see this too with the, so that Fluke one came out with that headless unit. Yeah. And there's been one or two others, right? But those are, those are definitely, those are like more traditional multimeters versus, so yours has like actual overtime tracking type stuff, right?

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. It has a support for an SD card. Yep. Dada logging. Yep.

Chris Gammell: But I meant, I meant like tracking like on the, on the, the smartphone screen, like over time. You can do. Oh, sure.

Eric Van Wyk: The trend mode.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: So we can, if you rotate your phone, it detects that and puts it into a trending graph.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Yep.

Eric Van Wyk: And then that can either give a high frequency burst. So at up to four to eight kilo sample through a, through a one kilohertz analog front end or updating, you know, a couple of times a second so that you can see slower trends.

Chris Gammell: Got it. Yeah. And so I remember you had this in your intro video too. You had this in like the hood, under the hood of a car kind of monitoring something you could, you know, monitor from the other side of the firewall as you started up. I remember that was one of the examples. Obviously you said robots. What other stuff like isolated type stuff as well?

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. What I really like is that it's a two channel, which allows you to start taking a look at some of the relationships.

Dave Jones: Well, it's voltage and current, right? It's not two voltage channels.

Eric Van Wyk: So it depends. There's, there's three inputs. One of them is a internal current shunt. One of them is a up to 600 volts category three. And the third one is either resistance or diode drop or precision voltage input. So that thing caps out, I think 1.2 volts maximum input.

Dave Jones: Got it. So, so if you want anything over a couple of volts, you need to use the 600 volt input.

Eric Van Wyk: Exactly.

Dave Jones: Right. Got it.

Eric Van Wyk: But one of my favorite things is to use that with external current shunt. So if you want to measure something like power factor or other unitless measures where the gain accuracy of just using a piece of copper doesn't matter, it's a really handy way to do that. Right. So we can enable any two of those three channels. And from that, start taking a look at the relationships between them. Cool. One of the difficult things in FRC is to track battery health. And so from this, you can pull out the, the VI curve of your battery pretty fast and, and dead cells just light up like a Christmas tree on that graph.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Like you mean, as they go over that final, the dive at the end, you mean? Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: You see a discontinuity in the VI curve that indicates one of the cells is dying or dead. Huh. That's cool.

Chris Gammell: So can you gang these things up too? Like, can you have multi's, multi units going into one like phone or do you have to have, you know, pair them up separately? Sure.

Eric Van Wyk: There's the, the, the marketing response to that is that yes, but we, but the engineering response to that is not yet. There's, there's nothing inherent to the protocol that prevents that. But as of right now, we have not put the development effort into enabling that.

Dave Jones: Cause that was going to be my question. When you're making something like this, you may as well make it multi-channel.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But you know, time and money, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. We can have it right. Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: It's definitely on the list. Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, the dreaded list. Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: Oh, yes. We know how lists go.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Now I've got a project coming up that uses Bluetooth LE or I want to use Bluetooth LE. Do you have any numbers on how low you can actually go in terms of transmit power? Sorry, transmit current. How much current, well, power that these things take during transmit? What's the absolute lowest you can get? Cause my project is super duper ultra low power. Yet I want to transmit some data at like one second burst.

Eric Van Wyk: Okay. The, the number that I usually ballpark with is, uh, about a hundred microwatts average draw. If you're waking up and, uh, bursting every five to 10 seconds.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. I'm interested in peak current of the transmitter, not average.

Eric Van Wyk: You know, I don't have those numbers on hand, but I'd be happy to take a look for you if you'd like.

Chris Gammell: But how can you measure them? Wirelessly. Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. That's, that's our new multi-channel approach. We'll have mushy meters measuring mushy meters. It's mushy meters all the way down. That's it.

Chris Gammell: Uh, I love it. So, uh, let's, let's talk a little bit about the, uh, the logistical side. I mean, so you crowdfunded this thing. What, what was that, uh, process like and kind of taking us through, I guess, kind of taking us through your blog posts. You have a lot of good blog posts here. Oh, thank you. But what's, what's been the journey?

Eric Van Wyk: Uh, so marketing is not something that comes to me naturally and it's not something that comes to James naturally. Uh, so fortunately I was able to, to pull on several mentors that I've picked up over the, over the years and they slapped a little bit of sense into me. Um, we, we, we never went for too much of a glitzy glamour approach and instead just wanted the product to speak for itself. Uh, so if you look at our video, I don't think, I don't know if there's any human faces in it except for maybe the last little montage.

Dave Jones: Right. And, and you went through Dragon, right? Yes. Uh, why, why is that? Why didn't you just do your own thing?

Eric Van Wyk: Um, so I think what Dragon provided for us was mentorship in the areas that, uh, we, we didn't have experience or, um, a background in. Um, like, so like marketing, like, uh, that whole crowdfunding aspect, how do you, uh, engage people? Um, and, uh, it was really valuable to, to be able to talk to their team and to, to pull from their experience.

Dave Jones: So how does that work? Do you guys, uh, pitch to them and they?

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Crowdfunding sites don't do anything.

Chris Gammell: Indiegogo definitely checks to make sure, you know, you filled out every field, I'm sure.

Eric Van Wyk: And the email address, uh, is bad. Yeah. Yeah. But no, if you, if you look at, uh, the, the crowdfunding threshold that we set, um, what that is, is the result of a, uh, you know, my favorite thing is a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet calculation of what the legit break-even point would be, uh, rounded up. Yeah. And, uh, there's some, a little bit of fudge in there for potential things going wrong. Um, but we, we had to fully plot out everything before they give the green light. That's awesome.

Dave Jones: So it goes on their platform, right? It doesn't go on Kickstarter. It goes on through their own platform.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. And from there it works, uh, functionally like a Kickstarter type setup.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. It works functionally like it, but how do you get that Kickstarter hype? You know, would there, do you think this thing might've been more successful if it went on Kickstarter or do you, or.

Eric Van Wyk: You know, I ask myself that, uh, every once in a while and, and I, I don't know.

Dave Jones: Um, right. Yeah. Because yeah. Yeah. You just haven't tried it. Right.

Eric Van Wyk: So Kickstarter definitely has the advantage in just raw eyeballs.

Dave Jones: Um, it's an, it's an instant market kind of, well, not for everything, but it's.

Chris Gammell: No, but yeah. I mean, you've talked about this too, Dave. It's not necessarily, uh, you know, you have to bring a lot of your own eyeballs, but I think then it has that kind of little bit of buzz with it too. You know?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Because there's nerds like us just, you know, all we do is sit there, look through the Kickstarter. Oh, what's the latest technical project on Kickstarter? Oh, that looks cool. I'm going to back that, you know? So, so you get those extra eyeballs just. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But no, I don't think data, I don't think the data backs that though, Dave. That's what I'm saying. Like I think that, I think that what it, what it has is when you, when someone sends you a link and they say, oh, it's a Kickstarter. It's like, oh, okay, I'll go check this out. You might be more likely to click it.

Dave Jones: Whereas if you go, oh, this is a dragon innovation. People go, oh, what's that? Right. Well, I must already know what it is. Yeah. Exactly. Which we do, but most people don't. So. Right. Hmm.

Chris Gammell: I was surprised that, so I had thought when, when I saw your campaign and I talked to you about this, I thought that being part of the dragon crowdfunding thing meant that also they took you on as like a manufacturing type of. Yeah. That's what I thought. Sure.

Eric Van Wyk: So dragon offers both services, but they're not necessarily locked together. So you can take advantage of either one or both.

Dave Jones: So do you choose that upfront or do you choose it after and go, oh no, I can't get this manufactured. I have no idea what I'm doing. Please do it for me.

Eric Van Wyk: Either option is available, but we, we knew upfront that we were going our own route.

Dave Jones: Okay. Okay. Yep. That's cool. And has that been a pain in the ass? You'd never do it again or. Oh. Um.

Eric Van Wyk: It's okay. You can say yes. I agree with the first part of your sentence. I disagree with your second. So yeah, it is a pain. Would I do it again? It's a blast.

Dave Jones: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. We're a glutton for punishment, nerds. They never learn.

Chris Gammell: They never learn.

Eric Van Wyk: I really like talking to manufacturing engineers and getting their insights on, on how they actually make the product.

Dave Jones: So what's, what's been the trickiest part about making this? Is it compliance? Is it injection molding? Is it production testing?

Eric Van Wyk: What is it? Definitely compliance. Right. It's the, the, the, the difficult part of compliance is that, uh, anytime that they find a need for a design change, uh, it is a schedule hit and it's an expensive schedule hit. Um. How, how much are we talking about? So they don't charge any additional money. It's, it's that your schedule is now paused until you can unpause it. Um, which means that if, if, if, if when you're doing your prototyping, you're used to saying, oh, I can do this on a two week turn time. Uh, now it's, how can I possibly get this here before I go home for dinner? Uh, emergency racing. Um.

Dave Jones: Did you ever consider just not getting, you know, not doing any compliance testing on it? You know, safety testing, all that sort of thing. No. Do you like being sued, Eric?

Chris Gammell: Do you, do you like lawyers?

Eric Van Wyk: Uh, I'm not a big fan of being sued. Um, although I've never tried it. Well, you won't know until you try it. I've never tried it.

Dave Jones: So, uh, maybe don't knock it. You do live in America, so. Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: So, uh, one of the surprising things for me was seeing how little testing was required for the United States. Uh, the FCC testing was just take a look at the emissions. Oh, yeah. Kind of glance a little bit about immunity and zap it with the ESD gun at like, was it 4KV or 2KV? It was something hilariously low. Um.

Dave Jones: And it either works or it doesn't. If it works, congratulations, you passed. If it doesn't, well, re-spin it.

Eric Van Wyk: And you're good to go. Um, now we had promised our backers from day one that we were going to be, uh, 61010-1 and 61010-2-0.

Dave Jones: Can you explain those standards for those out there?

Eric Van Wyk: So, the, the 61010 standard, uh, generally covers, uh, product safety for, uh, a bunch of different categories of devices. And then the dash 2 dash something standard refers to specific, uh, types of devices. So, for example, multimeters are, uh, covered either by dash 030 or by, I think it's dash 032 and 033.

Dave Jones: Um. And, uh, these, uh, come down to the CAT ratings that you see on multimeters. Yeah. So, uh, what, what, what is yours rated? What voltage in CAT?

Eric Van Wyk: We're rating for, uh, category 3, 600 volts.

Dave Jones: 600 volt CAT 3. Okay. Yep.

Chris Gammell: So, does that mean, like, you put 600 volts of working, working voltage on the actual case and then it has to, like, not leak through? Or how does that work?

Eric Van Wyk: Oh, it's way harder than that. What it means is that it needs to be safe for operation in a 600, with a 600 volt circuit, uh, when something goes wrong. Um.

Dave Jones: I.e. a huge surge on the line comes through.

Eric Van Wyk: Yes.

Dave Jones: Um. Like an 8 kilovolt surge for X microseconds, you know.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. And that was actually the easy part. So, I think it's, is it 6 kV or 8 kV for CAT 3 600?

Dave Jones: No, it's at least 6. Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: It's at least 6. And, uh, the spec is, I think it's like a 1.2 slash 50 pulse. Yep. And we can handle that at DC. Um. You can just.

Dave Jones: And, and, and it's about the energy of the pulse. It's not about just, you know, 6 kV static discharge test. It's a, like, a real thumping. Yeah. You know.

Chris Gammell: Area under the curve kind of thing or what? Well, it's 6 kV coming from a tool source.

Dave Jones: If you've seen my video where I use Doug's, yeah, where I use Doug's machine to blow up a multimeter, like, it explodes. That's the kind of machines that they use to. It's a very, it can be a very destructive test. So. Yeah. And, and that one is easy. And it has to fail safe, right? That is the, that is the key. Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: Um. So, fail safe in a different way than medical devices. In a medical device, when it fails, uh, you typically need to warn the user. Right. Which means that, uh, a multimeter can fail safe by carbonizing internal to its case. Um. So, rapid disassembly as long as it doesn't hurt the patient or hurt the user. Exactly. As long as it doesn't physically explode and blow someone's hand off. Right. But if you're making a medical device, it has to say, excuse me, uh, you should probably go and take care of this now. Um. Sorry. And have a good day. Right. How polite. Uh, the, the, the safety testing that we had, uh, difficulty though, was with, um, the dielectric withstand test. So, the, the test you were describing is, uh, impulse into the device. So, that's across, uh, common to voltage. That's right. And we have a, I think it's 10 or 20 mega ohms sticking in the way. And it's this big ass resistor. So, that's fine. Yep. Uh, but what they also tested was, uh, 5,400 volts AC RMS. So, that's 7,600 volts peak, uh, somewhere in that range, uh, across the housing.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah. That's the test I was thinking of.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. So, what they do is disassemble your device, uh, put it in a sauna. Stick a probe in? No, they put, they put in a sauna for 48 hours. So, it's 93% relative humidity at, uh, 42 Celsius? 43 Celsius? 48 hours, uh, reassemble it and then, uh, wrap it in aluminum foil and blast the hell out of the thing. Uh, 5,400 volts. And, and that one was a bit difficult because we had attempted to expose the SD card to the user. Um, and.

Dave Jones: Ah, yes. Yeah. That's the, that's the killer. Ah, right there.

Eric Van Wyk: And when you did the math, uh, we had margin. But, uh, when you test it, we were right on the edge. So, you have to survive that for five seconds. We survived it for two and a half after, uh, degradation from previous testing. Oh. And, uh, you know, we, we made the decision that we could try a few more times, but I just want to make absolutely sure that we're going to not be in any form of danger to the user. And so, we had to seal that up.

Dave Jones: Did you like, yeah. Did you recess it in further, put a rubber boot over the SD card or something like that or what?

Eric Van Wyk: So, uh, we, we recessed it as far as it can go, but you still need to access it. So, if it was recessed further, it wouldn't have been accessible anymore. Um, and then the interesting part about the rubber boot is that what they'll do is put it in the least, uh, happy configuration that it can be that doesn't require using a tool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly.

Eric Van Wyk: Right. So, if you have a boot there.

Chris Gammell: So, it's like idiot testing, basically? Say it again? It's like idiot testing? Like, they, they intentionally do it wrong?

Eric Van Wyk: It's sociopath testing. So, an idiot will just poke at it, but a sociopath will like pry it open and wedge something in there and attach his tongue to it.

Chris Gammell: Bubble gum. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's brilliant. We have to add that word to the show title, Chris. Sociopath. Okay. Sociopath testing. Yep. Okay.

Eric Van Wyk: And that's why you see a lot of, uh, battery compartments are now requiring either, uh, like using a quarter, like a coin to open it.

Dave Jones: Right, to, yeah, to open them, yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: That's considered a tool, um, in, in toys. So, I know the Lego, uh, brick, you, it requires two levers to open. And, and for that particular safety standard, that puts it in a new category, um, because it's no longer reasonable for the user to open that during normal operation. Huh. Uh, but there wasn't a way to, to partially seal that, that wouldn't be, uh, breached during test.

Chris Gammell: So, you had to actually change the mold then or what?

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. Uh, fortunately it was just adding plastic so that it was a pretty quick remachining.

Chris Gammell: Ah.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. So, it's cheap to add?

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Like a little protrusion to the outside of a mold?

Eric Van Wyk: Yep. It's, uh, the molding process is a negative process, which means that, uh, to add plastic, you remove steel. Ah.

Chris Gammell: Put it back in the milling machine. Yep. Right. Got it. Yeah, it's bad when you have to, uh, when you have to remove plastic, right? Is that the right way? Yeah. Because then you have to weld. Yeah. So, at that point, you have to weld and redo it.

Eric Van Wyk: You have to attach some new insert to it somehow, and welding is one of the common ways to do that.

Dave Jones: So, how much do these molds cost for something like this, for people who are thinking about having a reasonable looking product like this, you know, in its own custom case?

Eric Van Wyk: Uh, depends wildly on, on where you're going, but, uh, stateside about 20 grand, uh, in Shenzhen about five grand. Right.

Dave Jones: And how long a lead time?

Eric Van Wyk: Uh, well, our, our compliance testing, uh, made that completely irrelevant, but, uh. Right. Yeah. It was, it was just a couple weeks. Um, okay. When we did the full Gantt, it, it barely impacted anything.

Dave Jones: And what kind of mold did you get for what sort of volume?

Eric Van Wyk: Um, so we left that in the capable hands of our contract manufacturer. Uh, it's a steel mold, um, but I can't remember which particular grade steel they chose to use for that. Okay. Uh, but it should be good for maybe 10 to 20,000 shots.

Dave Jones: Right. And because you only got basically a thousand backers, so how many of these did you anticipate selling?

Eric Van Wyk: Uh, so we manufactured twice as many.

Dave Jones: Okay. Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: Of course you would.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Eric Van Wyk: That's smart.

Dave Jones: But did you have any ballpark when you started out? Like, we think we can sell 10,000 of these, or we think we can sell.

Eric Van Wyk: Sure. So, um, the, the way we approached that was, uh, through our break-even analysis. So we, we, which might be putting the, the cart ahead of the horse, but, um, we calculated the minimum number of backers that we would need to be able to make this a viable product launch and went from there. Of course.

Dave Jones: That's a, that's an absolute minimum you have to do.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. Yeah. And then, uh, we, we figured out what the step function is for, um, what our cogs cost will be compared to the number of units produced. Um, so there, there's discontinuities in that function. And we, we had to talk to our contract manufacturers to find where those were. Um, we were, we were aiming in this thousand unit range, but I think neither of us wanted to jinx it. So we didn't admit it.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. At, at what sort of volume do your costs come down dramatically in this thing? Is there any sort of volume that you can see, or is it just pretty much whether it's 500 or 5,000, it's really going to cost the same? Sure.

Eric Van Wyk: So the, the absolute worst number of things to make is 1,000.

Dave Jones: Right. Why?

Eric Van Wyk: So it's that transition point where, um, faster prototype type manufacturing techniques are more cost, uh, advantageous. And it's a little bit before the, the super high volume techniques come into play. As in the moldings in the. Yeah. Well, you can still do molding, but it matters, uh, what type of molds you do. Okay. So 5,000 is where things are looking pretty good. And once you go above 5,000 and I'm, I'm super hyper generalizing here. So I apologize for that. Yeah. Of course.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: But 5,000 is that like the difference between 5,000 and 10,000 is okay. Not going to change your, your overall strategy too much. Yep. But the difference between two and a half thousand. One and five. Yeah. One and five is gargantuan. Got it.

Chris Gammell: We should also mention too, for people that haven't seen this before, how much is it? So what was the, the, what did people pay as backers and what's the retail going to be?

Eric Van Wyk: Sure. Uh, so during the campaign, uh, we had two prices up, uh, for, for students, it was, uh, about $80 and for non-students, it was a hundred dollars. And we chose to do that in lieu of like an early bird, uh, type special. There was a little bit of early bird, but most of that discount came in the form of student discount.

Dave Jones: I'm, I'm not a fan of this early bird special thing. I think you should pay more to get it, get it early. But it's all part of the psychology of getting people to back your project early. Yeah. You know, it's like, I know it's like, yeah, we've talked about this before.

Eric Van Wyk: Well, I'll be happy to add the, the Dave category for funding and just tell me how much more you want to pay and I will gladly. The Dave adder. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, like, yeah, like I don't like the idea of, of them paying less and then you shipping them early. Like if, if you want me to ship it to you early, I think you should pay more. Oh, I see. You know, it's one of those. Yeah. That's kind of where I'm coming from there. So. Yeah. So my campaigns, I will like, yeah. Okay. If you want to be the first batch, then you pay a little bit more, you know, otherwise you go into the regular batch. I don't care if you backed it first or not.

Chris Gammell: If only every, uh, crowdfunded campaign started with 150,000 YouTube subscribers, I'm sure that it would work out. I know. It's just peachy Dave.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I know. 170 or 180 now. Thank you very much.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah, sure. Okay. Yeah. Right.

Eric Van Wyk: I think we're up to 80 now ourselves. Not, not thousand, just 80.

Chris Gammell: Just 80. Nice. You got to start somewhere. That's good.

Dave Jones: And did you find that you, it cost about what you expected or did you run over budget or you, um. Balls did in and you had plenty of money left over.

Eric Van Wyk: So, uh, cogs, uh, landed pretty much where we were expecting. Cost of goods sold. Yeah. Sorry. Cost of goods sold. So what we pay to, to make the device, uh, I think we were within 10% of our initial projection.

Dave Jones: That's very, very impressive. Yep.

Eric Van Wyk: Um, yeah, you, you, you, you ship enough designs through the process and you get better at it. Uh, but it was also that we were very, very hesitant to, to expand features and feature creep ourselves into after our original design. Um, the, the testing was a little bit more expensive, but specifically in the, oh my God, overnight, get me the replacement right now because we have backers breathing down our backs.

Dave Jones: Right. And. Ah, see that, this is where you've got to learn to ignore those pesky backers. That's what the best crowdfunding campaigns do. They just ignore their pesky backers.

Chris Gammell: Or just take the money and run. One of the two, you know, just.

Dave Jones: We'll just deliver eventually.

Chris Gammell: Yes. That's right.

Dave Jones: We're, we're, we're trying to form a business here. So it was that your intent? Did you want to start like a business, form a company, or did you just want to do a cool product?

Eric Van Wyk: Um, to, to me, it was the product. Um, I've, I've always angled my career towards the thing that I'm doing rather than.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Eric Van Wyk: The.

Dave Jones: And we like that here on the Amp Hour, don't we, Chris?

Chris Gammell: We do.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. Oh, good. I was, uh, didn't know if I told you the right answer.

Chris Gammell: Uh, he was ready to switch over to the other one right away. He was.

Eric Van Wyk: Like on a dime.

Chris Gammell: Eric, we don't like that here on the Amp Hour. Okay.

Eric Van Wyk: Then that is not what I think at all. Um. I was excited, uh, excited to, to get this type of device out and see how users interact with it. Um, see what type of new use cases it would generate. Um, one of the really cool parts about running the campaign was getting emails from, from various, uh, potential backers or from various backers. Yeah. It's fun. Said, oh, can you do this with it? And just sit there for five minutes and say, oh my God, you can do that with this. Um, we never thought of that. Um. Yep. So yeah, I, I'm, I'm particularly excited about the product, um, and what that'll enable.

Dave Jones: So, unfortunately, you're probably going to leave to do your teaching thing. You're probably not going to have much, much to do with this anymore. Or how's that working?

Eric Van Wyk: Uh, so I will be hopefully, uh, knock on wood, uh, going to grad school in the fall. So if any of your listeners want to be my advisor, that would be fantastic. Uh, just skip the whole application process. Graduate. In what? Uh, I'm, I'm particularly interested in, uh, low power wireless and, uh, distributed sensing.

Dave Jones: Right. So you're going to go get, well, what, a, uh, master's or a PhD?

Eric Van Wyk: A PhD because my, my goal is to be able to teach. Um.

Dave Jones: Ah, right. And you've got to have a PhD to teach. Yeah. Don't you? I'm not sure how that works.

Chris Gammell: At top schools usually, yeah. And if you want to do research too. Stuff like that. Okay. Yep. Uh, you signed yourself up for a fun, a fun ride, buddy. You felt production was bad. And how long is that going to take? Yeah.

Dave Jones: How long, how long are you looking at?

Eric Van Wyk: So I'm, I'm budgeting five years and then I'll hopefully be pleasantly surprised if it is shorter than that.

Dave Jones: At, uh, where? Where at?

Eric Van Wyk: We'll find out.

Dave Jones: Oh, right.

Eric Van Wyk: I'm in the, I'm in the, I'm in the application process. Ah, right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Right. Right. Yes, of course.

Chris Gammell: Uh, so let's talk a little bit about the hardware, the hardware itself. Cause we probably should talk about electronics on an electronic show. Sure. Uh, what, uh, I mean, is this open source, not open source? I don't actually even know.

Eric Van Wyk: Uh, this is not open source, but it is open interface.

Chris Gammell: Okay. So can you tell us what chips are on board or is that like not even that?

Eric Van Wyk: Oh, sure. Uh, our, our BLE platform is the CC 2540 by Texas instruments. Uh, and that's basically just a BLE radio and a 8051 in the same box. Um, and actually the very, very first version used the little like 12 bit A to D built into it that has three bits effective, um, just to see if the use case. Three bits effective.

Chris Gammell: Power monitoring. Maybe. Is it on? Yes. Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: I mean, they, they advertise it as like a nine bit effect. It's, it's cute, but, uh, really all I wanted to see was whether or not the use case would be at all valuable. Um, so you just.

Chris Gammell: A to D built with RF transistors. Switches really fast.

Eric Van Wyk: Um, and then we, uh, we slapped, uh, uh, analog front end from, uh, TI in there as well, which is the 1292, um, which is actually meant for a heart rate monitoring. Uh, oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. The, uh, channel like the, well, same, same, uh, same family, but, uh, it says, uh, two, uh, simultaneously sampling, uh, eight of these. And I think you're referring to its sister that has eight of them.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. That's the one for, uh, not EKGs, whatever the, the body current ECG, the body current monitoring one. That's the one that always has eight. I know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Um, so it's two channel 24 bit, uh, analog front end.

Eric Van Wyk: Yep. With, uh, internal, uh, 12 X PGA. Oh, right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Those are great.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: The only shitty thing is always, uh, trying to find those on like search sites as, uh, cause they always separate out A to Ds from front end chips. Yeah. Actually. That's annoying.

Eric Van Wyk: I don't see why they do that, but.

Chris Gammell: Uh, because data. I could talk about that in future shows if we'd like.

Dave Jones: And of course you're, and of course you discovered that a 24 bit ADC doesn't actually give you 24 usable bits out.

Eric Van Wyk: Sure. Of course, uh, we've been pulling, uh, in, in our highest speed settings, maybe 18 effective, um, and, and nudging a little bit over 19, uh, when we slow down and, and pay attention a little bit more.

Dave Jones: At the full, what? 8 K sample rate?

Eric Van Wyk: Uh, so at, at 8 K, then it's down at 18 and at, uh, like a hundred or so, then it's, it's back up to 19 point something.

Dave Jones: That's still pretty good actually. Yeah. Um, well, I, I come from the seismic industry where that's piss poor. Yeah. You know, we use. You're not doing 8K though, were you? I mean. We, we were doing, uh, 4K.

Chris Gammell: Oh, really? Oh, I didn't know. Yeah, we were doing 4K. But you were also probably paying. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, we're, we're, we're, we're paying $200 a chip.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. And it's burning like 10 watts each time.

Dave Jones: Well, no, cause that was a bastard too. Trying to get low power. Anyway. Yeah. Totally. Entirely different market. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. What, what about the power though? So, uh, what's the battery life on this thing?

Eric Van Wyk: Uh, so we're, we're still characterizing to, to make absolutely certain, but the, the number that I like to, to work with is a hundred microwatts. Um, so at that point, if, if all you're doing is waiting for someone to come back and pay attention to it, um, then you can actually get into the years. Uh, but as soon as you start to, to really crank it, um, so if you turn on everything and set it to yes, please vary, uh, it gets down into the, to about a 10 day battery life if it's going continuous.

Dave Jones: And it's powered from, powered from two double A batteries. Is that right?

Eric Van Wyk: Two standard double A batteries.

Dave Jones: And I assume you have to boost that up because, well, can you, or do you work straight off it down to like the minimum 1.6 volts?

Eric Van Wyk: So the logic runs straight off of that. Uh, but we do boost and filter the analog front end just so that it's stable.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Do you shut off the front end, uh, uh, like in order to save power to that or how does that work?

Dave Jones: Um, right.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. That whole end just shuts right down.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's cool. You would have to, otherwise you'd be chewing a lot of power.

Eric Van Wyk: And you boost converter. Yeah. And there's too many linear elements in there to, to keep them running.

Dave Jones: And what voltage for the battery did you get down to? What's your low cut out? Sorry. I need to talk about that. I love that. I know.

Eric Van Wyk: For the digital end. Uh, I would have to.

Dave Jones: No, your entire product. What can the batteries work down to? Like if you're powering it from alkalines, can they work down to 0.8, which is deemed to be the minimum working voltage for a AA alkaline. And then it just falls off like a brick wall after 0.8 volts.

Eric Van Wyk: Uh, I think our, our original design before we were boosting left about, uh, it was something up in the 15 to 20% of that. So we were before the 0.8.

Dave Jones: Uh, but once we added the boost. So you're probably a volt or something. You're probably a volt per cell then.

Eric Van Wyk: Yep. Um, but once we added the boost, we're, we're good to, to drain those, uh, straight down.

Chris Gammell: Right. So what about, uh, so, so Dave knows a lot about these, uh, sense elements. So, so like what's the range on, uh, input currents as well? I guess we can read some of this stuff, but, uh, so again, I'll do 10 amps, but that means you're doing like, are you using like super fancy metal foils like Dave is or on the microcurrent or what?

Eric Van Wyk: Uh, no, it's, it's just a, a, a nice, um, uh, what is the technology here? So that I don't lie to you by accident. I mean, it's, uh, well, I will pull up the schematic right now, so I'm definitely not going to lie to you.

Dave Jones: And are you doing software cal of the units or is it? Definitely software calibration since we have a, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you can use cheap parts. Yes. Low drift. Whereas I'm, I'm using precision parts. That's why each one of my shunt resistors costs $5. Oh goodness. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah. I, I have mixed feelings on, on calibration techniques, but, uh, I, with this one, because we're going to need to calibrate to hit anyway, then I'm, I'm happier with a low drift and fix it in software approach rather than the, the hit it straight out of the, the birth canal.

Chris Gammell: Um, that is the first time I've ever heard that phrase, but, uh, Chris locks it. He's going to use it. I will not be borrowing it now. I'm sorry. Yeah. I mean, that's, I mean, it's, I think it's probably good too, because I think about like a bench meter too, you know, you usually those respect for like warmup times and stuff like that, but you know, this thing's going to be who God knows where, right? So there could be a lot of time or, you know, temperature variation and stuff like that.

Eric Van Wyk: So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Cool. Uh, so what else should we know about this thing? What, uh, so are they, are they shipping to producers yet or?

Eric Van Wyk: Sure. So, uh, the latest blog post, uh, showed the circuit boards in full manufacturing. And so we should be receiving those.

Dave Jones: Watch the video as they went through. Yep. The pick and place.

Eric Van Wyk: I love that pick and place machine.

Dave Jones: Yeah. They're great. Aren't they? You can just, yeah. There's just magic.

Eric Van Wyk: You just have to make sure that you haven't done any soldering yourself within some safety window, uh, to see that thing go and place dozens of devices per second. And then you do a board in an hour or two. Yeah. It's insane.

Dave Jones: Um, so we're targeting a feeble human skills. If only I was a robot.

Eric Van Wyk: I'm tired of soldering these QFNs, um, by hand, but, uh, you gotta, you gotta prototype at some point.

Dave Jones: Oh, goodness.

Eric Van Wyk: So now we're, we're hoping to ship to backers in mid-October. Uh, all systems are go. Most of the components are either already in our warehouse or sitting on a customs dock right now. And, uh, the main thing we're waiting for right now is the circuit boards, which are in beautiful production.

Dave Jones: So is the, so is the, ultimately is the project late or on time or what?

Eric Van Wyk: Uh, it's a little late. Uh, I think we're slipping two months.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: Um, and. Not bad for crowdfunding, I gotta say. Yeah, I know.

Dave Jones: Some of our two years. Yeah. So.

Chris Gammell: Especially when this tested. That's a, that's another thing we mentioned before the show. Totally. I think the fact that it's, you know, crowdfund, I think we set a bar pretty low for crowdfunding projects. Not, no offense to some of them. Right. But, um, but yeah, I mean, that is tested and everything. That's, that's impressive to me. I like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. This is full compliance tested, safety tested. I mean, how many crowdfunding campaigns do that? Not many.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So then what? People can, uh, start buying them or what?

Eric Van Wyk: Uh, you can pre-order them right now, um, on our website, uh, m-o-o-s-h dot i-m, or, uh, as soon as they ship, then we'll convert that pre-order button to an order button. Um, and hopefully we'll be in the distributor stock very soon after.

Dave Jones: And you're going to sell it yourself or are you going through a distributor or what?

Eric Van Wyk: A bit of both. Um, okay. Don't want to talk too much about details there until it is officially public, but yeah, we're.

Dave Jones: That's cool.

Eric Van Wyk: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It might be available through Artifruit. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Me and Erica talked about how this, this would be a good platform for something like contextual electronics too, where it's like, you know, it's good balance of like stuff people have like a phone or a tablet or something. And then, but also pretty decent accuracy specs, stuff like that, you know, stuff that people can use.

Dave Jones: Is it going to be in the sexy, the sexy C3 case? Yes.

Eric Van Wyk: I love that part.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's good, isn't it? Very nice.

Eric Van Wyk: I'm sure that we stayed well away from fluke yellow. So, uh. Uh, you're right. Yes.

Dave Jones: Have you thought about like a little silicon holster for it or something?

Eric Van Wyk: Oh, like a transport. Oh, that's interesting.

Dave Jones: Like a, yeah. Just a little holster so it can grip on thing, you know, cause otherwise with the plastic ass just sliding around, you know, you shove it in your product, you're trying to measure it slides around.

Eric Van Wyk: Sorry, when you said silicon, I, I, you, you meant with, uh, with oxygen in there as well.

Dave Jones: Um. Oh, well. Silicon. Like a phone. Those, you know. Sure. Yeah. The phone slip on.

Eric Van Wyk: But, uh, right now our volumes don't support that type of housing and I'm, I'm hoping that they will soon grow to the point where they do.

Dave Jones: What volume do you need? Cause I'm curious to know about that. Uh, I mean.

Eric Van Wyk: For something. It's that we could support it. Like if a thousand people said tomorrow, we want this case and we will pay for it. Right. That's plenty. But, uh, right now we've only had people tell us they want the meter and they haven't told us they want the housing.

Chris Gammell: We want a meter and we want some double sided tape and we'll be fine. That's it.

Eric Van Wyk: So our current mounting methods are, uh, zip ties or lanyard loops, uh, straps down to us pretty well. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Nice.

Chris Gammell: I, when Dave said holster, I was thinking like, uh, like six shooter, you know, like cowboy. Right. Having like a, you know, having two mooshy meters at the side and draw.

Eric Van Wyk: I'm hoping for a bandolier of them.

Chris Gammell: There you go. Oh, that'd be, that'd be good. That's some marketing stuff right there. Now endorsed by Chewbacca.

Eric Van Wyk: We should have gotten you as our marketing team.

Chris Gammell: Oh, well, no, I'm not available. Sorry. But yeah, I think, I think a lot of people in the audience are, I'll be interested in, and try one of these things out. I think the price is right. Especially, you know, this is that right price point of like, yeah, I'll try it out, you know, for sure. Right. Yeah. Why wouldn't I? And so I think a lot of people will be very pleasantly surprised with this. Oh, thank you. It does work Android and iPhone, or just one?

Eric Van Wyk: Android and iPhone.

Chris Gammell: Nice. Sweet. Cool, man. Anything else people should know about the mooshy meter or mooshy engineering?

Eric Van Wyk: I think we've covered it. Thank you. Cool. Thank you.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah, people should, like we said, people should definitely check out the blog post. There's a lot of good, a lot of good learnings and pain in there. That's, there's good reading there. So definitely check that out.

Dave Jones: So can people stalk you on social media? I am. Of course, when we say social media, we mean Twitter, none of that Facebook. Yeah, usually.

Eric Van Wyk: Yes, but our Twitter account is mostly links back to our blog.

Dave Jones: Well, I'm talking about you personally.

Eric Van Wyk: Oh, God, no.

Dave Jones: They might like you. They've heard you on The Amp Hour. They might love you. They might want to follow you.

Eric Van Wyk: I'm too much of an introvert for that.

Chris Gammell: Ah, that's no, that's the perfect platform of the introvert. You just tweet and then you go away. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. You just don't respond to anyone. You make snarky comments and then people give you job offers. You know what I mean? There we go.

Eric Van Wyk: Although I don't think I could do another job right now. I've got four on my plate, so I've got to calm it down.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, well, you can make snarky comments about how you have too much work. Yes. Well, thank you very much for joining us, Eric.

Eric Van Wyk: Oh, thank you very much. It was a blast.

Chris Gammell: People should definitely check out Mooshim and buy a Mooshim meter. Thanks again, Eric. Thank you. Bye-bye. Catch you later. now i put a triangle over here and it has you know six db extra gain well did i tell you that

Eric Van Wyk: i have uh six patents on circles that are about uh half an inch in diameter

Chris Gammell: no